Nocturnal private cares

miercuri, 21 octombrie 2015

Edward Said

I.

As something to be talked and written
about, as a phenomenon with nearly hysterical descriptions and
pronouncements routinely added to its name as a mobilizing theme for
politicians, armies, navies and air forces, ‘terrorism’ has now lost a
good deal of its power. A mere matter of months ago thousands of
Americans cancelled trips to Europe because they feared the terrorist
threat; in April 1986 the United States raided Libya during the prime
time tv news in order, it was said, to
deal with the terrorist threat posed by Libya (on a pretext—the bombing
of a West Berlin disco—which has since proved not to be Libya’s
doing). All during the period from 1983 through 1985 and 1986,
‘terrorism’ claimed public attention on a scale hitherto unknown. At the
behest of the us
administration—amplified by dutiful, unreflecting media—numerous
governments made pronouncements about, and any number of moves against,
terrorism, so much so that during this period the Secretary of State
elevated terrorism to the status of ‘number one’ foreign policy problem
for the United States and, he went on to suggest imprudently, for the
world.

As a result, even though attention to
terrorism has quite noticeably diminished, the word still comes easily,
trippingly to the tongue. Now, it would be disingenuous at this point
for me not to connect terrorism as a word and concept with
perhaps one reason for my examining of the subject in these reflections.
The reason, of course, is that mainly in the United States, but also
generally speaking in the West, terrorism is by now permanently, and
subliminally associated in the first instance with Islam, a notion no
less overused and vague than terrorism itself. In the minds of the
unprepared or the unalert, Islam calls up images of bearded clerics and
mad suicidal bombers, of unrelenting Iranian mullahs, fanatical
fundamentalists, and kidnappers, remorseless turbaned crowds who chant
hatred of the us, ‘the great devil’, and all its ways. And behind the wave of ‘Islamic’ images battering the us’s
unprotected shores stand the string of Palestinian
terrorists—hijackers, masked killers of airport crowds, athletes,
schoolchildren, handicapped and elderly innocents—who in the unexamined
popular mythology of our day are presumed to have begun the whole
shameful and frightful thing. Since I am known as having associations
both ethnic and national with Palestine and with Islam, I am therefore
presentable before audiences as someone who, when it comes to terrorism,
really knows (in the invidious sense of the word) what he’s talking
about.

The Need for Explanation

I will not
waste the reader’s time by saying more about this deplorable
concatenation of assumptions, other than quickly to allude to that
combination of discomfort and resentment which remains with me from the
moment I begin to take on the subject. Nevertheless, it has seemed to be
also true that despite the tremendous damage caused by ‘terrorism’
itself and representations or reactions to it, there are some
reflections that can be made about both, reflections whose articulation
is made possible by the abatement in organized public hysteria I spoke
of a moment ago. Precisely that abatement will, I think, enable us to
reconnect representations of ‘terrorism’ to contexts, structures,
histories and narratives from which, during the word’s period of
greatest prominence, its representations appeared to be severed.

For
the most striking thing about ‘terrorism’, as a phenomenon of the
public sphere of communication and representation in the West, is its
isolation from any explanation or mitigating circumstances, and its
isolation as well from representations of most other dysfunctions,
symptoms and maladies of the contemporary world. Indeed, in many
discussions there is often a ritual of dismissing as irrelevant,
soft-headed or in other ways suspicious, anything that might explain the
actions of terrorism: ‘Let’s not hear anything about root causes,’ runs
the righteous litany, ‘or deprivation, or poverty and political
frustration, since all terrorists can be explained away if one has a
mind to it. What we should be after is an understanding of
terrorism that helps us defeat it, not an explanation that might make us
feel sorry for the terrorist.’ Thus terrorism was stripped of any right
to be considered as other historical and social phenomena are
considered, as something created by human beings in the world of human
history. Instead the isolation of terrorism from history and from other
things in Vico’s world of the nations has had the effect of magnifying
its ravages, even as terrorism itself has been shrunk from the public
world into a small private world reserved tautologically for the
terrorists who commit terrorism, and for the experts who study them.

No
less strange was the common agreement in expert literature and rhetoric
that no real definition of terrorism was actually possible. It is true,
of course, that writers like Clare Sterling and Benjamin Netanyahu felt
no compunction about defining terrorism as whatever seemed inimical to
the West, Israel, the Judeo—Christian tradition and Goodness, but it
would be wrong and misleading to accuse all writers on terrorism of such
robust self-confidence. Many are like Walter Laqueur, one of the most
respectable academic specialists who began work on the subject well
before the recent vogue. Laqueur frankly admits that ‘no definition of
terrorism can possibly cover all the varieties of terrorism that have
appeared throughout history; peasant wars and labour disputes and
brigandage have been accompanied by systematic terror, and the same is
true with regard to general wars, wars of national liberation and
resistance movements against foreign occupiers.’ Later he tries somehow
to rescue his topic from this welter of ubiquity, valiantly suggesting
that even though terrorism resists definition it can be discussed in the
context of movements that have used ‘systematic terrorism as their main
weapon’. But when he asserts that that practice begins in the second
half of the nineteenth century (Terrorism, New York 1977, p. 11)
we will, I think, have lost faith not only in his philosophical acuity
for trying to describe something that he says cannot adequately be
described, but also in his historical sense for studiously ignoring the
revolutionary Terror of France some seventy-five years earlier.

It
is less on Laqueur’s own failings than on terrorism as an apparently
isolated but identifiable disturbance that I wish to concentrate. In
fact the appearance of isolation has almost always been misleading. For
terrorism has regularly appeared in contemporary conjunction with, among
other stigmatized groups, Islam, Palestinians, Iran and Shiism—that is,
objects, concepts, peoples and cultures poorly and antithetically
known, and therefore more liable to technical, metaphysical, and
ultimately ideological constructions. There is first the powerful aura
of the exotic, and even the literary, that surrounds terrorism. Its
literary roots are Eastern, and if one thinks of Dostoevsky’s The Possessed or Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, the Assassins and Thuggees, there is in addition the louche,
the gratuitous, the senselessly cruel that adheres to it. Moreover, the
terror of terrorism appears indiscriminate and generalized: no one is
safe from it, none insulated, none immune. Facts and figures are not
easy to get hold of, although the hint of vast numbers of casualties is
always there, from the random explosive set off in a market place to the
nuclear device that just might kill uncounted thousands. Rarely does
one hear the tonic reminders of the disparity in violence between
individual terrorists and conventional armies, given by Gillo Pontecorvo
to Larbi Ben M’Hidi in The Battle of Algiers, ‘Give us your bombs and you can have our women’s baskets.’

These
techniques of decontextualization and dehistoricization are not new and
have occurred elsewhere in colonial or post-colonial situations. Irish
resistance to British rule, for instance, was routinely classed as
terrorist by British writers who then built on the classification a
theory of retributive response that quite ignored historical
specificity, proportion or concrete analysis. Thus Robert Louis
Stevenson wrote in ‘Confessions of a Unionist’ (1888) that so
unsuccessful had British policy been in Ireland (‘Through
sentimentality, through the craven vagaries of a popular assembly, we
have suffered the law to tumble in the muck’) that ‘Irish lawlessness’
had triumphed, along with the ‘Irish appeal to violence’. Therefore he
advocated no change in British colonial abuses ‘until the whole
machinery of terrorism is destroyed’, and this by a wholesale brutality
meted out by ‘vigilance committees’. Any other policy would be
succumbing to ‘maudlin sentimentality’. Curiously enough Stevenson’s
editor in 1988, Jeremy Treglown, does not flinch from Stevenson’s ‘call
for an end to terrorism in Ireland’, only from his inability to say ‘how
the extirpation of violence is to be brought about in practice’. Thus
does the inebriately self-justifying revulsion provoked by the word leap
across the years with little regard for context or power. Similar
rhetorical flights were routinely in evidence when Cypriot or Mau Mau
‘terrorists’ were discussed in the post-war years.

Terrorism and the Islamic World

But
the issue that chiefly concerns me here is terrorism as it engages
public awareness of the Middle East and of the Arab—Islamic world in
particular. The presence of this region and its people in discussions of
terrorism is, I believe, quite unique. To my knowledge, of no other
country, no religion, culture or ethnic group except Islam and its
societies, has it been said that terrorism is, after a fashion, endemic.
This is argued by several of the Orientalists who contribute to perhaps
the most visible and influential of the popular anti-terrorist manuals,
the collection edited by Benjamin Netanyahu, Terrorism: How the West Can Win.
By the nature of the argument, evidence is problematic, but it is
bandied about anyway, with curious results. All sorts of strange objects
appear—for example, the Islamic mind, ancient feuds, remarkable but
unnameable proclivities to wanton violence—all of them attesting to
essential traits that supposedly have been there eternally and are
susceptible neither to historical change nor to any sort of
amelioration.

Since ‘terrorism’ is indefinable and
entirely negative, these arguments for its connection with Islam and/or
Palestinians have rarely been opposed. The point is that there is
hardly any way, there are few enunciative opportunities, to oppose such
arguments about terrorism without also seeming to be for it.
Unanimity is intimidating, particularly on this scale, but during the
full-scale terrorist alert—for example, during the 1986 bombing of Libya
or the 1985 twa hijacking—you could not
deny the Islamic ingredient, you could not present supervening
arguments, you could not prevent the guilty associations from spreading,
without also appearing in some way to explain, hence condone, the
outrage. The framework was entirely hostile to anyone who did not accept
the perfect equivalence between the State which seemed to be attacked,
and injured innocence; indeed, very little inhibits the framework from
expanding to include, on the part of the United States, the Western
heritage, morality and outraged virtue.

Perhaps
the most sensible intervention in the verbal dust-storm has been Eqbal
Ahmad’s, which appeared in the May–June 1986 issue of MERIP Reports.
Ahmad’s premise is that terrorism—‘acts of intimidating and injuring
unarmed, presumably innocent civilians’, acts for which there are five
sources, ‘state, religion, protest/revolution, crime and pathology’, of
which ‘only the first three have political motivation’—does exist and is
a source of genuine concern, but needs analysis and discrimination if
we wish to do ‘justice to its victims, or to understanding’ on both
sides of ‘the ideological boundary’. Ahmad offers a set of half-a-dozen
guidelines for analysis. These are: terrorism is connected to ‘the need
to be heard’, since it ‘is a violent way of expressing long-felt,
collective grievances. When legal and political means fail over a long
period a minority of the aggrieved community elicits the sympathy of the
majority with violent acts.’ Moreover, Ahmad continues, ‘anger and
helplessness produce compulsions towards retributive violence’—a factor
that explains the violence not only of the helpless but also of the
powerful: ‘I have pounded a few walls myself when I am alone’, said
President Reagan in 1985. Then we should acknowledge the sad truth that
‘the experience of violence at the hands of a stronger party has
historically turned victims into terrorists.’ Similarly, ‘when
identifiable targets become available, violence is externalized’—that
is, people pass from the stage of pounding walls to shooting what stands
before them.

Ahmad’s last two points are the most
complex, and have to do with a subtle interplay between the technology
of weapons and of the media on the one hand, and political ideology on
the other. Examples of massive and senseless violence enable the spread
of terrorism. Thus the Indochinese war, history’s most visible
superpower intervention, conducted at a high level of organization,
effectiveness and cruelty, showed the way governments can plan violence
against civilian populations; the emulations of this violence by poorly
organized and goalless small groups are also attempts to imitate the
legitimization asserted by states who use violence to gain dubious and
unclear ends. Finally Ahmad suggests that the more detailed,
territorially grounded and concrete the ideological goal as set forth by
insurgent and revolutionary groups (e.g. the Vietnamese, Algerian,
Cuban, Angolan and Nicaraguan uprisings) the less likely the possibility
of spectacular and intimidating violence. ‘Revolutionary violence tends
to be sociologically and psychologically selective. It strikes at
widely perceived symbols of oppression—landlords, rapacious officials,
repressive armies. It aims at widening the revolutionaries’ popular
support by freeing their potential constituencies from the constraints
of oppressive power.’ To dispersed or homeless peoples the appeal of
terror is the ease and instantaneity of transportation, whose symbols
are the airplane and airport, of coercion, whose instrument is the small
lethal hand weapon, and of communication, whose mode is the electronic
media, which offer an immediate means of directing a message. Thus have
the invisible and terror-filled wars waged by states been challenged by
the frightening visibility of unpredictable acts of violence by small
bands of adventurers.

What further distinguishes
Ahmad’s contribution to the enormous literature, the widely diffused
imagery, the much-marketed expertise on terrorism is something left
implicit in his remarks: the role of the interested observer. He writes
from the perspective of a militant whose support of anti-imperialist
struggles has not, however, stilled his critical sense. So much of the current discussion and representation of terrorism simply assumes
the disinterestedness, detachment and objectivity of the author. Yet it
is a truism of contemporary interpretative theory that no such position
can or ever did exist. Thus, to take as an example a social discourse
based on the construction of an observer who articulates the discourse, anthropology
presumes to offer scientific material about ‘Others’ afforded to
ethnographic experts, whose power to observe, live among, participate in
the lives of foreign societies is premised on the power of their
constituencies to travel abroad, do anthropology, etc. Similarly, with
few exceptions the discourse of terrorism is constituted by an author
whose main client is the government of a powerful state opposed to
terrorism, but also anxious to shield itself from arguments about
perceptions of its own (quite routinely barbaric and violent) behaviour.
Why this is so should be obvious, since the disproportion between state
violence and (so-to-speak) private violence is, and always has been,
vast.

Nowhere is this paradigmatic rhetorical
combination of client-appeal and blockage more clear than in the work of
political scientists in Israel and the usa,
states whose recent foreign policy has been staked on the fight against
terrorism, a political decision arrived at consciously and therefore
ideologically as a method for dealing with resistance to us–Israeli
power; in addition this decision made it possible for the
government-sponsored outpouring against terrorism either to screen or to
legitimize the governmental violence of both countries.

Campaigns of Disinformation

Consider
Israel, which in many ways has pioneered the notion that democracies,
because they are democracies, are especially liable to gratuitous
terrorism. According to the respected Israeli journalist Amnon
Kapeliouk, writing in Le Monde Diplomatique in February 1986,
Israeli policy-makers began in the mid-1970s the discipline of
describing as terrorism everything done by Palestinians to combat
Israeli military occupation; the decision coincided with the growing
international prestige and legitimacy of the Palestinian national
movement. In this decision, of course, Israel was following the path
taken by other regimes of colonial occupation (the French in Algeria,
the Americans in Vietnam, the South African government in its
description of the anc and its
resistance). By the summer of 1982 this campaign of indiscriminate
disinformation led to some of the tactics of Operation Peace for
Galilee, where what was a massive war against a sovereign country and a
national liberation movement could be described as a campaign against
terrorism. The distinction of the Israeli informational manipulation of
the word ‘terrorism’ was that it was done more or less in conjunction
with the most powerful media apparatus available—no other subimperial
power in history could avail itself of so formidable an imperial system
as the American. The result was that more or less anything that
disturbed the peace and was ostensibly done by someone of whom Western
civilization was thought to disapprove, was called a terrorist outrage.

Until
the television screen was suddenly filled with images of Israel’s siege
and devastation of Beirut and South Lebanon during the summer of 1982,
‘terrorism’ was supposed by most journalists and audiences to be an
almost Platonic essence inherent in all Palestinians and Muslims,
without historical, social or political circumstances or conditions.
Even more important, however, the discourse of ‘terrorism’,
counter-terrorism, terrorist expertise obliterated all the historical
processes that might conceivably have produced so many terrorists and so
many acts of terror. In the case of Israel, the Palestinian argument
had posited the existence of a society and of a people, of a nation in
short, whose continuity had been shattered in 1948, and whose subsequent
travail was, in the main instance, the result of a continuous war
against the Palestinian people by Israel which to the Palestinians
proclaimed itself to be conducting a war that made no distinctions
between civilians or armed combatants, between refugee camps, hospitals,
schools, orphanages, and what the Israeli military command regularly
referred to as terrorist nests. Readers will appreciate that I speak
here as an engaged Palestinian and not as a political scientist, and
they will, I trust, grant me the right to say that despite the
wall-to-wall coverage of the Palestinian struggle as an extended
terrorist assault upon Israel, the record is a dreadful one, in the loss
of thousands of Palestinian lives, of homes destroyed, of literally
uncountable human catastrophes suffered by this nation of Palestinian
terrorists. I do not need to say here how the recent mass insurrections
and sacrifices of unarmed Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank testify
dramatically to, on the one hand, an entire history of iron-fisted,
anti-terrorist Israeli policy of repression, and, on the other hand, the
vacant political message, equally anti-terrorist, delivered to them by
the Israeli government which has acknowledged only a conflict between
terrorism and democracy.

Gradually the intifadah,
or uprising, in the Occupied Territories has increased in intensity,
has further laughed out of court the notion that Palestinian resistance
equals terrorism, has irreversibly transformed the shadowy status of
Palestinian nationalism into proto-statehood, and Israeli policy into a
dying colonialism. But what has been revealed to Palestinians by the intifadah
is the true political mass basis for all national liberation movements,
in which neither the uninstructed gun alone nor the random (if
understandable) outrage has anything like the moral and mobilizable
force of coordinated, intelligent courageous human action. When one of
the uprising’s leaders in Gaza was asked by a journalist how unarmed
children, men and women so routinely defied Israeli troops, the answer
testified elegantly to how a popular movement had in fact banished
terror. ‘Fear,’ he said, ‘has been forbidden.’ And that was that.

But
I also want to say that in the specific case of ‘talking terrorism’ in
the Middle East, distinctions and connections have simply not been made
enough. There has been terrorism, there has been cruel,
insensate, shameful violence, yes, but who today can stand before us and
say that violence is all, or even mainly, on the side of the labelled
‘terrorists’, and virtue on the side of civilized states who in many
ways do in fact represent decency, democracy, and a modicum of ‘the
good’? I must therefore confess that I find the entire arsenal of words
and phrases that derive from the concept of terrorism both inadequate
and shameful. There are few ways of talking about terrorism now that are
not corrupted by the propaganda war even of the past decade, ways that
have become, in my opinion, disqualified as instruments for conducting
rational, secular inquiry into the causes of human violence. Is there
some other way of apprehending what might additionally be involved when
we now unthinkingly use the word ‘terrorism’? Is there a style of
thought and language that pretends neither to get past the word’s
embroiled semantic history, nor to restore it, cleansed and sparkling
new, for further polemical use?

II.

Throwing
up unfamiliar, or at least newer settings in which to set the
unpleasant tingling induced by the word ‘terrorism’ is a worthwhile
alternative to simply attacking habitual uses of the word. The very
totalism, the radical and impermeable oppositions that set off the word
from its use by the enemies of terrorism furnish a beginning. We
normally encounter the word not when used by terrorists to describe what
they do, but rather to identify and fix a particularly pernicious
assault upon humanity, like Conrad’s throwing ‘a bomb into pure
mathematics’ in The Secret Agent. But things are rarely left to
indirection and suggestion. Contemporary ‘terrorism’ is identified with
terrorists, who, as I have been saying, are most often ‘our’ enemies,
Muslim, Palestinian, etc. Similarly ‘we’ are the West, moral,
collectively incapable of such inhuman behaviour, etc.

What
I want to draw attention to here, on both sides of the absolute line
separating terrorism from its opponents, is that there is assumed to be a
perfect correspondence between terrorism, terrorists, and Islam or
Palestine, if the terrorists are Palestinian Muslims, just as on the
better side of the contest, ‘we’ completely embody morality, the West,
and so forth. In other words there is a process by which various
identities in alignment end up by fusing completely with each other: the
terrorist with Islam, communism, and whatever other undesirable
identities we wish to foist on him, the opponent with all the desirable
qualities which, one assumes, fit around ‘us’ like a perfect body
stocking.

Even when the analyst of terrorism tries
to take a ‘middle path’ the compacting of identities proceeds apace. I
have in mind the rather ambitious book by Beau Grosscup entitled The Explosion of Terrorism,
in which the author tries quite intelligently to separate out the
ideological hype and flat-out exaggeration that flaws most of the
writing on the subject. His approach, which he calls a middle way
between polemic and apologetics, is historical and situational, but he
too is obliged to incorporate cultures, peoples, traditions and regions
of the world, with more or less complete congruence, to the practice, if
not the essence, of terrorism. To some degree this is an exigency of
writing and exposition—how, for instance, can you talk about people who
describe themselves as Iranian fighters without somehow associating Iran
as a whole with their style of fighting?—but to some degree also the
difficulty stems from the modern habit of connecting people with their
identities as members of a national group.

There
is no other way. So deeply ingrained is the tendency to funnel society
into the mould prepared for it by the nation-state, that we cannot
conceive of societies except as thoroughly congruent with the state, as
if the teleology of all social entities was the state. To some extent,
of course, this is an understandable tendency for thought in an age so
dominated by nationalism, the nation-state, and various statist
ideologies. Any reader of the vast literature on modern nationalism,
especially some of its better works like Hugh Seton-Watson’s Nations and States or Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities,
will testify to the compelling logic of statism, and to the manifest
difficulty of escaping its premises, or of thinking outside its limits.
This is one among many reasons for admiring the efforts made by Pierre
Clastres in Society Against the State to criticize the biases
that have infiltrated most of our thinking about society. But he is a
singular exception to the rule pervading most political discourse.

Terrorism
in short must be directly connected to the very processes of identity
in modern society, from nationalism, to statism, to cultural and ethnic
affirmation, to the whole array of political, rhetorical, educational
and governmental devices that go into consolidating one or another
identity. One belongs either to one group or to another; one is either
in or out; one acts principally in support of a triumphalist identity or
to protect an endangered one. Very often ‘terrorists’ end up
reproducing the very structures that have ‘alienated’ them (Sendero
Luminoso, the Abu Nidal group, etc.). The interplay of identity and
alienation is therefore total, and it can be observed in a brilliant
epitomization in one of the daring mytho-poetical archeologies offered
by Vico speculatively in an early section of The New Science.
Vico speaks here of the origins of authority in ‘the world of the
nations’, and tries to explain the prevalence everywhere of matrimony
and religion as the two fundamental components of the modern state. The
passage deserves quotation in full because Vico quite amazingly and
presciently stakes social order and identity upon the confinement of
disorderly energies by the fearful terror of Jove’s power:

Authority was at first divine; the authority by which divinity
appropriated itself the few giants [these are Vico’s first human beings]
we have spoken of, by properly casting them into the depths and
recesses of the caves under the mountains. This is the iron ring by
which the giants, dispersed upon the mountains, were kept chained to the
earth by fear of the sky and of Jove, wherever they happened to be when
the sky first thundered. Such were Tityus and Prometheus, chained to a
high rock with their hearts being devoured by an eagle; that is by the
religion of Jove’s auspices. Their being rendered immobile by fear was
expressed by the Latins in the heroic phrase terrore defixi, and
the artists depict them chained hand and foot with such links upon the
mountains. Of these links was formed the great chain of which . . .
Jove, to prove that he is king of men and gods, asserts that if all the
gods and men were to take hold of one end, he alone would be able to
drag them all. . . . Hence it was that the giants gave up the bestial
custom of wandering through the great forest of the earth and habituated
themselves to the quite contrary custom of remaining settled and hidden
for a long period in their caves (paras. 387–8).

Vico is trying first to describe the
birth of divine authority, then in the section about the giants’
settling down, of human authority. According to the Sophists, he says,
this is the way the world is ‘girdled and bound’. Tityus and Prometheus
seem to be models for heroic individuals who have gone too far in living
beyond the strictures laid down by Jove; therefore they must be visibly
punished and permanently fixed in place, their hearts eaten out. Most
other human beings, however, are prepared to accept the places offered
them as domestic beings—hence matrimony and religion—by Jove. These
early peoples come to inhabit caves, and later houses, but the important
thing is that they cease wandering around. Jove’s terror is used to
tame human terror, to fix it in social, and subsequently in national
pigeon-holes, although Vico does not minimize either the heroic or the
transgressive terror of Jove, whose imposing gifts for authority and
punishment directly antecede the modern state’s monopoly on coercion.

The Logic of Identity

Thus
terror emanates from any attempt to live beyond the social confinements
of identity itself; and terror is also the means used to quell the
primal disorderliness of the unconfined human being. After Vico a number
of social theorists took up his vision of the modern social or state
order as one in which authority is based principally upon the
organization of coercive power, and neither upon national consent nor
upon a benignly ordained and pre-existent harmony. Thus, for example,
Sorel’s notion of the general strike as a violent disruption of an
unreasonable social nexus stems from such a supposition. Fanon’s whole
theory of colonial counter-violence (which contains in it some of the
transgressive heroism that Vico assigns to the vanquished titans)
answers to the rationalized violence of the colonial order, with its
separation of the colonial from the native city, its attempts to include
the native as a subordinate example of universalized ‘Graeco–Roman’
values, its swiftly retributive inclination when it is challenged or
otherwise inhibited by its subaltern victims. Finally, there is
Foucault’s description of the order, discipline, discourse of society,
gathering into itself the numerous specialized technologies for
controlling, surveying, and manipulating knowledge and its producers,
subject only occasionally to the heterogeneous, quixotic, venturesome
counter-violence of the outcast, the visionary, the prophet.

In
the contemporary contest between stable identity as it is rendered by
such affirmative agencies as nationality, education, tradition, language
and religion, on the one hand, and all sorts of marginal, alienated or,
in Immanuel Wallerstein’s phrase, anti-systemic forces on the other,
there remains an incipient and unresolved tension. One side gathers more
dominance and centrality, the other is pushed further from the centre,
towards either violence or new forms of authenticity like fundamentalist
religion. In any event, the tension produces a frightening
consolidation of patriotism, assertions of cultural superiority,
mechanisms of control, whose power and ineluctability reinforce what I
have been describing as the logic of identity. But since what I have
been articulating is somewhat abstract and almost metaphysical, it is
probably a good idea to be more concrete.

I want
to look at two instances in which the power of what Adorno, in an
English phrase coined for him by Martin Jay, has called ‘identitarian
thought’ is deepened. These are first, media practice, and second,
recent debates on education. Of the way in which immediate experience is
emasculated by ‘the consciousness industry’, Adorno says: ‘The total
obliteration of the war by information, propaganda, commentaries, with
cameramen in the first tanks and war reporters dying heroic deaths, the
mishmash of enlightened manipulation of public opinion and oblivious
activity: all this is another expression for the withering of
experience, the vacuum between men and their fate, in which their real
fate lies. It is as if the reified, hardened plaster-cast of events
takes the place of events themselves. Men are reduced to walk-on parts
in a monster documentary-film . . .’
[1]

It would be irresponsible to dismiss
the effects of domestic electronic media coverage of the non-Western
world—and with them the displacements that have occurred within print
culture—on American attitudes to, and foreign policy towards, that
world. I have elsewhere argued the case (which is more true today than
it was when I first made it over ten years ago) that limited public
access to the media coupled with an almost perfect correspondence
between the ideology ruling the presentation and selection of news
(whose agenda is set by certified experts in close collaboration with
media managers) on the one hand, and prevailing government policy on the
other, maintains a consistent pattern in the us imperial perspective towards the non-Western world. As a result, us
policy has been supported by a mainstream ‘identitarian’ culture that
has not been noticeably forceful in opposing its chief tenets: support
for dictatorial and unpopular regimes, a scale of violence far out of
proportion with the violence of native insurgency against American
allies, a remarkably stable hostility towards the legitimacy of native
nationalism, most of which is compressed into the word ‘terrorism’. Out
of this has come a stubbornly held conviction that American power in the
world is the sentinel of freedom, or in President Johnson’s words ‘the
guardian at the gate’.

The concurrence between
such notions and the world-view promulgated by the media is therefore
quite close. The history of other cultures is supposed to be
non-existent until it erupts into confrontation with the United States,
and hence is covered on the evening news. Most of what counts about
foreign societies is reduced first into sixty-second items, then into
the question of whether they are pro- or anti-American (freedom,
capitalism, democracy). The ultimate choice facing the professional
interpreters of, or experts on, ‘other’ peoples, as these experts are
framed by the media, is to tell the public whether what is happening is
‘good’ for America or not, and then to recommend a policy for action.
Every commentator or expert a potential secretary of state.

The
internalization of norms for use within cultural discourse, the rules
that must be followed if statements are to be made, the ‘history’ that
is made official as opposed to the history that isn’t—these are some of
the ways in which all national states regulate public discussion and
private identity. The difference today is that the truly epochal scale
of us global power, and with it the
corresponding power of the national consensus created domestically by
the electronic media, have precedents neither in the extent to which it
is difficult to oppose this consensus nor in the ease and logic with
which one unconsciously capitulates to it. Conrad saw Kurtz as a
European in the African jungle, and Gould as an enlightened Westerner in
the South American mountains, as capable of both civilizing and
obliterating the natives. The same power, but on a world scale, is true
of the United States today.

An Imperial Corpus

But
my analysis would be incomplete were I not at this point to introduce
another important element. In speaking of control and consensus one can
use the word hegemony advisedly. I do not want at all to suggest
that there is a directly imposed regime of conformity in the
correspondence I have drawn between contemporary us media discourse and us
policy in the subordinate, non-Western world. What I have been
discussing is a system of pressures and constraints by which the whole
cultural corpus retains its maddeningly imperial identity and its
direction. This is why I think it is perfectly accurate to speak of a
mainstream culture as possessing a certain regularity, integrity, or a
system of predictable stresses over time.

In
relation to mainstream American culture, marginalization by the imperial
centre means a fate of provinciality. It means the inconsequence
associated with what is not major, not central, not powerful—in short,
it means association with what are considered euphemistically as
alternative modes. And also alternative states, peoples, cultures. There
are alternative theatres, presses, newspapers, artists, scholars, and
styles. The images of centrality—which are directly connected with what
C. Wright Mills called the power elite—supplant the much slower and
reflective, the much less immediate and less quick processes of print
culture, with its encoding of the attendant and relatively recalcitrant
categories of historical class, inherited property, and traditional
privilege. Centrality in American culture today is the dominance of the
executive presence: the president, the tv commentator, corporate official, celebrity. And, finally, centrality is identity, what is
powerful, important and ours. Centrality maintains balance between
extremes, it endows ideas with the valances of moderation, rationality,
pragmatism, it holds the middle together.

And
centrality gives rise to semi-official narratives with the capacity to
authorize and embody certain sequences of cause and effect, while at the
same time preventing the emergence of counter-narratives. The
commonest, and in this instance most effective, narrative sequence is
America as a force for good in the world, regularly coming up against
the obstacle of foreign conspiracy, which is usually perceived as
ontologically mischievous and ‘against’ America. Thus American aid to
Vietnam and Iran was corrupted either by communists or by terrorist
fundamentalists; the result is ‘our’ humiliation and the bitterest sort
of disappointment. Conversely the valiant Afghanistani moujahidin (‘Freedom-fighters’) have much in common with Polish Solidarity, Nicaraguan contras,
Angolan rebels, Salvadoran regulars, ‘we’ support them all. Left to our
proper devices, ‘we’ would assume their victory, but the meddling
efforts of liberals at home, disinformation experts abroad, have reduced
our ability to help them to the fullest degree.

But
to an even greater degree the power of such narratives is to interdict,
marginalize or criminalize alternative versions of the same history—in
Vietnam, Iran, the Middle East, Africa, Central America, Eastern Europe.
A very simple empirical test of what I mean is what happens when you
are given the opportunity to articulate a more complex, less narratively
sequential history than the official ones carried by the media, which
reinforce what corporate, government, and policy spokespersons rely
upon. In fact you are compelled to re-tell ‘fact’ in such a way as to be
inventing a language from scratch. The most difficult thing to do then
is to suggest that the already existing history and presence of foreign
societies may not have responded with automatic assent to the imposition
of Western political or military power, not because there was anything
inherently wrong with that power but because it was felt to be alien. To
venture so apparently uncontroversial a truth about how all cultures in
fact behave turns out to be nothing less than an act of delinquency,
whereupon you feel that the enunciative opportunity offered you on the
basis of pluralism and fairness is sharply restricted to inconsequential
bursts of facts, stamped either as extreme or irrelevant. With no
acceptable narrative to rely on, with no sustained permission for you to
narrate, you feel yourself crowded out and silenced. Anything further
you might wish to say or do is likely to become ‘terrorism’.

The
bleak picture I have drawn is intended to stress in a heightened way
the processes of identity-enforcement that are likely to produce
rejecting, violent and despairing responses by groups, nations and
individuals whose place in the scheme is perforce inconsequential. Thus
the triumph of identity by one culture or state almost always is
implicated directly or indirectly in the denial, or the suppression of
equal identity for other groups, states or cultures. Nationalism
exacerbates the processes by offering what appears to be ethnosuicide as
an alternative to clamorous demands for equality, for sovereignty, for
national self-definition. And while it would be a mistake to ascribe all
the problems associated with random violence to this maelstrom of
escalating identity-demands, it would be an even graver mistake to
ignore the process altogether. No one in the United States today speaks
about limitations on sovereignty, for example, in rhetoric or in
political discourse, and few people here assume that there is a real
alternative for superpowers than more or less to run the world. But if
untrammelled aspirations based on projections of world power become the
norm for political behaviour, what checks are there on others who may
wish either to emulate these gigantic ambitions (the way
19th-century novelistic heroes felt that Napoleon was a model to be
copied) or to bring down the whole edifice that prevents them from
realizing the much smaller ambitions of statehood, cultural
independence, self-expression?

As for recent
debates on education, my second example, I shall have to be briefer.
This audience of readers does not need to be told that post-modernism,
post-Marxism, post-structuralism in intellectual discourse have
engendered a strongly antagonistic response in many sectors of
mainstream culture. Not only has this response involved various defences
of ‘the canon’ of Western humanistic knowledge, but it has produced
famously discussed screeds on such topics as the closing of the American
mind, and cultural literacy, all of which have had the effect of
clearing the space for a sanctioned rhetoric of national identity. This
is now embodied in such documents as the Rockefeller
Foundation-commissioned study The Humanities in American Life, or
the various expostulations, much more politically inspired, of
Secretary of Education William Bennett, who speaks not simply as an
American cabinet officer, but as self-designated spokesman for the West,
a sort of intellectual Head of the Free World.

What
do such texts as these ‘state of the culture’ works tell us? Nothing
less than that the humanities are important, central, traditional,
inspiring. Bennett has gone as far as saying that we can ‘have’ the
humanities by ‘reclaiming’ our traditions—the collective pronouns and
the proprietary accents are crucially important—through twenty or so
major texts. If every American student was required to read Homer,
Shakespeare, the Bible and Jefferson, then we would have achieved a full
sense of national purpose. Underlying all such epigonal replications of
Matthew Arnold’s exhortations to the significance of culture, is the
social authority of patriotism, the fortifications of identity brought
to us by our culture, whereby we can confront the world defiantly and
self-confidently. This is a drastic constriction of what in more
interesting contexts we have learned about culture—its productivity, its
diversity of components, its critical and often contradictory energies,
its radically antithetical characteristics, and above all its rich
worldliness and complicity both with authority and with liberation.
Instead we are told that cultural or humanistic study is the
recuperation of the Judeo–Christian or Western heritage as free as
possible both from native American culture—which the Judeo–Christian
tradition in its early American–Puritan embodiments set out to
exterminate—and from the fascinating adventures of that tradition in the
peripheral non-Western world.

Yet the cultural
disciplines have in fact found a hospitable haven in the academy, a
historical truth of extraordinary magnitude. To a very great degree,
Bennett’s most recent rhetorical intervention (‘To Reclaim a Heritage’)
has this accomplishment very much as its target, whereas we would have
thought that it has always been a legitimate conception of the modern
university’s secular mission (as described by Alvin Gouldner) to be a
place where multiplicity and contradiction coexist with established
dogma and canonical doctrine. This is now refuted by the rise of a new
orthodoxy. Its supposition has been that once having admitted Marxism,
structuralism, feminism, and Third World studies into the curriculum
(and before that an entire generation of refugee scholars), the American
university has sabotaged the basis of its supposed authority: hence,
the need for steady tonic infusions of Homer and Jefferson, especially
if these are administered by teachers convinced of our culture’s
superior mission in the world.

If by now the
reader will have felt that I have wandered very far from ‘terrorism’
he/she will be correct, but only because representations of terrorism
have been quarantined from the general affirmative and identitarian
tendencies in culture at the present time. Yet it would be ridiculously
frivolous for me to suggest that the dreadful violence of terrorist
actions can somehow be mitigated by acknowledgement of these tendencies.
What I am trying to suggest, however, is that it is a more worthwhile
endeavour for us to historicize, analyse and reflect upon such
tendencies than gregariously and ideologically to go along with the
chorus of attacks and patriotic dirges that are lifted when the word
‘terrorism’ is pronounced. In other words there is room for intellectual
discussion that partakes neither of the expert discourse of
counter-terrorism, nor of the partisan affirmations about ‘our’
identity. That kind of discussion may involve taking positions on
political conflicts in which terrorism or state-violence are regularly
employed, but it would more centrally enlarge the scope of debate and
induce a spirit of criticism as an antidote to the general yea-saying.

For
it must be incumbent upon even those of us who support nationalist
struggle in an age of unrestrained nationalist expression to have at our
disposal some decent measure of intellectual refusal, negation and
scepticism. It is at precisely that nexus of committed participation and
intellectual commitment that we should situate ourselves to ask how much identity, how much positive consolidation, how much
administered approbation we are willing to tolerate in the name of our
cause, our culture, our state. What could be more disgracefully an
instance of Benda’s trahison des clercs than the political
fervour of intellectuals for ‘our’ side, when so often it has been our
side that has been committing the violence in the name of Western
virtues, humanism, morality?

Talking about
terrorism can therefore become an occasion for something other than
solemn, self-righteous pontification about what makes ‘us’ worth
protecting and ‘them’ worth attacking. In education, politics, history
and culture there is at the present time a role to be played by secular
oppositional intellectuals, call them a class of informed and effective
wet blankets, who do not allow themselves the luxury of playing the
identity game (leaving that to the legions who do it for a living) but
who more compassionately press the interests of the unheard, the
unrepresented, the unconnected people of our world, and who do so not in
‘the jargon of authenticity’ but with the accents of personal
restraint, historical scepticism and committed intellect.

marți, 21 iulie 2015

"The 'bourgeoisiefied' British and other Euramerican working class is
the domestic class ally of imperialism. [...] The imperialist
proletariat and the semi-colonial bourgeoisie are the two class allies
of the capitalist-imperialist class."
(from Hosea Jaffe's letter of 11 January 1980 to Ernest Mandel)
"Regarding the article on the South African Student boycott and
strikes: its reportage was fair, except that it missed the failure of
the police attempt to use 'skollies' and 'tsotsis'
(lumpens, in a way) to divert the struggle of the people. Its attempt
was scotched by the high level of consciousness of the workers in the
Cape on the question of Non-European unity (thanks to long and continued
work, to this day, by the Non-European Unity Movement people and to NO
other tendency). The article talks of the relatively low political
consciousness in S. Africa but, good heavens, it is much, much higher
than that of the politically backward European and N. American workers!
Why this implicit chauvinism?...

The article ends up with the advice that the European and USA workers
should 'systematise' their 'aid' for the African unions in South Africa.
The Lord save us from this! We had it from Motherwell in 1928 (H.J. and
their Ballingers smashed the great Non-European union, the Industrial
and Commercial Workers Union)..."
(from Hosea Jaffe's letter of 24 October 1980 to Ernest Mandel)

"[...]
To tell the workers in the handful of rich countries where life is
easier, thanks to imperialist pillage, that they must be afraid of “too
great” impoverishment, is counter-revolutionary. It is the reverse that
they should be told. The labour aristocracy
that is afraid of sacrifices, afraid of “too great” impoverishment
during the revolutionary struggle, cannot belong to the Party. Otherwise
the dictatorship is impossible, especially in West-European countries." - V.I Lenin

"The
English proletariat is becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this
most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the
possession of a bourgeois aristocracy, and a bourgeois proletariat as
well as a bourgeoisie. For a nation which exploits the whole world, this
is, of course, to a certain extent justifiable.” and “You
ask me what the English workers think about colonial policy? Well
exactly the same as they think about politics in general. There is no
workers’ party here, there are only Conservatives and Liberal Radicals,
and the workers merrily share the feast of England’s monopoly of the
colonies and the world market.” - Friedrich Engels

We must FIGHT, REJECT, BOYCOTT the European
Economic Community. Socialism is not an "alternative" to the European
Economic Community, but can only be built on the ruins of the European Economic
Community. We must reject it and go to the workers with this message, in their
interests as well as those of the African victims (46 states) of the Lomé
Convention. (from Hosea Jaffe's letter of 29 May 1976 to Ernest Mandel)

Our second difference: EUROPEANISM and not
just the European Economic Community. It is unfair to suggest that if one is
anti-EEC one is pro one's own national imperialism. On the contrary, the
European Economic Community itself encourages this chauvinism and the anti-EEC
fight is not for this or that privilege inside the EEC but FOR ITS ABOLITION.
To say the least, this is the worst time to talk about any kind of United
States of Europe. Lenin, at one stage, REJECTED the slogan of a Socialist
United States of Europe. Since then there has been Hitler and then the European
Economic Community and the idea is WORSE now, not better... (from Hosea Jaffe's
letter of 2 June 1976 to Ernest Mandel)

We expect the workers in the European
countries to ally themselves with the colonial toilers and to join the bloc of
Workers States already existing, and not aim at a new bloc of European
socialist states, which is, objectively, a social-chauvinist illusion in our
present epoch of "late imperialism". (from Hosea Jaffe's letter of 2
June 1976 to Ernest Mandel)

To raise the United States of Europe slogan
today is to replace the call "Workers of the World Unite" with the
call "White workers of the World Unite". (from Hosea Jaffe's letter
of 21 November 1977 to Ernest Mandel)

The main and only historical oppressor in the
capitalist world is: IMPERIALISM. Nationally, this includes: North America,
Western Europe, Japan, Australasia, South Africa, Israel and European settlers
in South and Central America. These are national oppressors. They are also
racist oppressors. (from Hosea Jaffe's letter of 10 March 1978 to Ernest
Mandel)

The Western European proletariat is reactionary, because it is corrupted by
imperialist super-profits and limiting its struggles to economism. The Japanese
proletariat is obviously in the same category (it has conducted even less
anti-imperialist struggles than the Western European ones). The North American
proletariat is the most reactionary of all. The Eastern European proletariat is
also reactionary, as it has the tendency to involve itself in pro-imperialist
mass uprisings and insurrections (East Germany
1953, Hungary and Poland 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968, Poland 1970, not to speak
of Yugoslavia). The most important sectors of the Latin-American proletariat
(Argentine, Brazil) are settlers and therefore reactionary too.
This can only lead to one key conclusion: socialist world revolution is not
on the agenda for a long time. First there will be a stage of national
liberation in the colonies, the only genuine struggle going on in the world
today. After many decades, there could be some socialism on the agenda.
Some proletariats are so reactionary or hidebound that socialism cannot come
to them via a revolution but via a foreign blessing.
(from Hosea Jaffe's letter of November 21, 1977, to Ernest Mandel)

What is the United Socialist States of Europe
but a left-wing version of the imperialist multi-national EEC (the European
Economic Community)? It is European social-chauvinism. The unity of French and
German workers is irrelevant - it will only make the French as bad as the
Germans, at present anyway. (from Hosea Jaffe's letter of November 21, 1977, to
Ernest Mandel)

sâmbătă, 21 februarie 2015

Two
weeks ago, while perusing Brownsfashion.com, I discovered
a Dutch knitwear brand, WoolyBoolly, that was selling scarves made in poor countries such as Romania. One
of the scarves was sold for 755 €. Then I
discovered WoolyBoolly's page on Facebook, and I posted a message asking its owner, Nimi Ponnudurai, how
much she was paying the Romanian knitters. I told her that as a Romanian, I was
interested to know the cost of labour in Romania. She did not reply to my question
then, she left it there ignoring it, and went on publishing that Browns link I
had mentioned in my message, for advertising purposes. Yesterday I remembered about the question I had
asked her two weeks ago on Facebook, and checked WoolyBoolly's page to see if Nimi Ponnudurai had answered me, and
I discovered that she hadn’t. I posted a new comment, mentioning this time
that I found it hypocritical to call the exploitation of women in poor
countries such as Romania “empowerment” (as she does on her website: http://www.woollyboolly.com/about):

She cancelled my comment and sent me a private message claiming I "have it all wrong" and I was "rude", "angry" and "just miserable", and that "the women love what they are doing. They stay home and knit instead of working on the farm":